This invention relates to a cassette and cassette-rent control system, for example, utilizing the states of cassettes, such as the rent and return of cassettes, and more particularly to a rent control system for controlling the rent and return of cassettes, each containing an article such as an information-recorded medium and an IC circuit storing the commodity information concerning the article.
In rental shops for renting video tapes and video discs to the public, a clerk records, on a notebook or a rental slip, various necessary information, such as the name or the code of a rental article, the address and the name of a customer, and the rental date before renting articles, such as video tapes. When receiving the returned rental article, the clerk erases the rental records. Such recording work of rental information by the clerk reduces the efficiency of his rental work. Further, mistaken operations are inherent to such recording work, since it is performed manually. For example, he or she may fail to erase the recorded information when receiving the returned rental article.
Software rental companies for renting rental articles to the public must pay to the software suppliers, such as recording, TV and motion picture companies, a royalty which is calculated depending on the number of rentings. Therefore, the rental company must accurately control the renting work, at least the number of articles rented. Thus, if the conventional rent control is performed by manual work, it is almost impossible to accurately and quickly control the rental articles.
To cope with this, there is proposed a software rent control system. In this system, a bar code representing an article code is attached to each cassette tape. Membership cards are issued to customers, bearing the numbers assigned to them. In renting an article to a customer, the clerk reads out the bar code of the article by a bar-code reader, and stores into a memory device the bar codes together with the the customer's number.
However, this rent control system still involves problems in the rent control work. In the rent control system, the article code of cassette, which is being rented, have been stored in the memory device. To see how many times the cassette has been rented, it is sufficient to read and print out the contents stored in the memory. In this case, the clerk must read the bar codes of the cassettes every time they are rented or returned.
Additionally, the memory device does not contain such data indicating whether or not the unrented cassettes have been set in the shelf. Therefore, in checking inventories at the end of month or at the end of day work, the clerk must carefully check and itemize the stocked cassettes. This work is time consuming, and the results of the work are inevitably accompanied by inexactness.